This shot was taken a couple of months back on a stunning morning, with magical mists duelling with a warm, milky sunlight. I’ve shot here on several occasions in the past, but with the conditions being so special I was instantly drawn to this symmetrical shot.

What you can’t see in the final edit here is that I was standing at the foot of a 2 foot weir, my boots slowly filling with icy water, attempting to anchor my feet as much as possible lest I go spinning off into the watery vortex below. I especially love the vibrating lines of water at the bottom right & left of this image, caused when the water from the lake makes its way through the narrow archway.

With each week that goes by at this time of year, we lose almost half an hour of daylight. That means the sunrise is fifteen minutes earlier than it was the previous week.... and THAT seemed early!

We're ploughing headlong into the tricky summer months, where chasing the dawn light becomes an enormous commitment. This morning my alarm went off at 4.40am, and for the first time in what seems like an age, I very nearly rolled over and went back to sleep. Except I didn't. I am a light-chasing ninja, tirelessly committed to the cause! For now.

So with that in mind, I was in the car before 5 am and by 5.20 am was heading off into the sleepy surroundings of Kings Wood near Ashford, laden with a heavy backpack. The birds were slowly chorusing and a Tawny Owl's plaintiff hoots were echoing in the canopy far above me.

I wasn't especially enamoured with the light or the conditions, but when I took the image (above) I had an artistic vision of the woodland awakening from its slumber. The area I was shooting in was perfect, with massive mature beech trees well spaced out from one another, each one slowly rising to greet the new day as the sun's rays danced on their statuesque trunks.

As my regular readers will know, I am a student of sunrise. In the last few years, I've routinely woken in the early hours and taken magical mystery trips into the unknown with my camera in hand. But I struggle to recall a morning as saintly as this one.

One morning I was hunting sunrise on the South Kent Coast and I’d decided to take a section of the coast path that was unfamiliar to me. I’d been unable to find a parking spot and eventually just jammed the car into a sketchy lay-by and literally ran for the best part of a mile with my heavy camera pack to try to find a composition in time for the rebirth of the day.

I love how it sits, proud but isolated in a gently rolling field, surrounded by woodland in the shadow of the North Downs.

This was a bit of a renegade (unplanned) shoot, as I’d woken early and decided to head out to see what the light was offering from the top of the hills. If anything I was a little later than I should have been because the best light was quickly evaporating, even though it was still early. I noticed a beautiful streak of pinkness in the sky and knew it would be gone within minutes, so pulled over by the tree, ran into the field and quickly got the shot.

This shot came at the end of an epic, memorable night, spent shivering on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in subzero temperatures.

I was attempting to capture my first proper star trail image, so I had my camera set to shoot every 20 seconds or so at a 20-second exposure. Once you start these shoots, you’re committed to the long game, and committed I was!

There were all kinds of complications, not least the utter stillness and frigidity of the cold night air that insisted on coating the camera lens with a sheen of frost. Once that starts to appear, photos quickly become blurry and opaque, and it’s virtually impossible to remove in between images, so I ended up having to settle for around 100 decent quality images to build my star trail shot with. I’d also barely given a second thought to the rules of composition, that applies just as much at night as they do during the day, so the best I could do was find several skeletal trees as my attempt at foreground.

As light slowly bled into the night sky, a slow reveal began under bluebird skies. Blue hour was slowly subsumed by Golden Hour, and as the sun slowly crested above the dormant peaks, the new day was bathed in glorious magenta tones, the light duelling with the red sandstone of the peaks.

This image has been with me for a good few months now. During this time I’ve worked extremely hard on learning more & more about Photoshop and how to use it as an incredibly powerful darkroom for enhancing the photos I take and bringing every ounce of life and character out of them.

The weather’s been poor for the past few days, but this morning I headed down to The Warren at Folkestone to see what I could shoot at Sunrise. I can’t believe how quickly the days are drawing out! All of a sudden, a 6 am arrival on location is almost too late for the light.